UNRWA workers sexually exploiting women and girls in Gaza

But don’t worry. Nothing will happen to UNRWA.

By Hugh Fitzgerald, Frontpage Magazine

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees, or UNRWA, has since October 7 been exposed by Israel and others as having close ties to Hamas.

UNRWA employees in Gaza, including teachers and medical personnel, are now known to belong to Hamas.

At least nine UNRWA employees took part in the October 7 atrocities, and have been fired.

Israel believes that 100 UNRWA employees are members of Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ).

In addition, Israel says that 10% of the 13,000 UNRWA workers in Gaza have connections — without being members — to Hamas and PIJ. In UNRWA schools, the textbooks — despite UNRWA’s assurances over the past few years that its schoolbooks have been completely cleaned up — continue to glorify terrorism, incite violence, demonize Israel, and spread antisemitism.

UN Watch compiled a few telling examples in this March 2023 report:

• UNRWA’s Al-Zaytun Elementary School (Gaza) glorified terrorists and encouraged martyrdom.

In March 2022 and September 2021, fifth graders were taught to glorify Dalal Mughrabi, a terrorist who carried out the 1978 Coastal Road Massacre in which 38 Israeli civilians including 13 children were killed.

Photos taken of a classroom blackboard show how she is presented as “the fighting leader” and a “hero” who is to be honored by naming children and streets after her.

Likewise, in September 2022, 5th-graders at the school were taught to admire as a “martyr” and “hero” Izz Ad-Din Al-Qassem, the namesake of Hamas’ military wing, who had preached the murder of Jews.

On November 20, 2022, photos of a classroom blackboard from Social Studies class in the 5th grade Class 9 of the fifth grade show a map labeled Palestine.

The map includes the State of Israel – a UN member state, and marks areas and cities in Israel such as Haifa, Jaffa, Acre, and Beersheba as part of Palestine.

• UNRWA’s Al-Maghazi Middle School for Boys B (Gaza) endorsed violence, demonized Israel, and encouraged martyrdom.

In December 2022, an UNRWA-created Arabic reading comprehension exercise for 9th graders celebrated a Palestinian firebombing attack on a Jewish bus as a “barbecue party.”

Another UNRWA-created text, taught to 9th-graders at the school posted in December 2022, demonized Israelis as sadistic predators looking for prey by teaching reading comprehension using graphic descriptions of Israelis brutally murdering Palestinians in entirely fictional stories.

A “Zionist officer” deliberately shoots to death a Palestinian fisherman in front of his son in Gaza for being late to shore.

The graphic text describes a “fountain of blood bursting from his chest.”

In addition, 5th-graders at the school learned that martyrdom and jihad are “the most important meanings of life” through an exercise practicing vocabulary and grammar in Arabic language Learning material posted in September 2022.

• UNRWA’s Tel Al-Hawa Middle School (Gaza) endorsed violence, demonized Israel, and promoted antisemitism.

An UNRWA-created social studies lesson posted in September 2022 instilled in 9th-grade students the message that “armed struggle” against Israel is a “divine right.”

Another September 2022 UNRWA-created 9th grade social studies text spreads antisemitic propaganda by teaching the libel that Israel infects Palestinians with cancer by dumping toxic waste in the West Bank and Gaza.

• UNRWA’s Asma Middle School for Girls B encouraged schoolgirls to liberate the homeland by sacrificing “their Blood” and pursuing jihad.

UNRWA-created Arabic language material posted in September 2022 for the 6th grade includes an exercise promoting sacrificing one’s life—“the most precious thing” a person has—for the homeland as an obligation and to sacrifice “their blood.”

A grammar exercise states that “I will commit jihad to liberate the homeland” and “I will not give up a centimeter of my land.”

The last sentence further indicates students are taught to reject any territorial compromise with Israel.

On August 1 in Lausanne, Switzerland, at a ceremony observing Swiss National Day, UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini was about to give the keynote address when Ayelet Samerano, whose murdered son Yonatan was kidnapped to Gaza by an UNRWA worker on October 7, rose from the audience to confront him.

She cried out “UNRWA kidnapped my son. Where is he, Mr. Lazzarini?” Lazzarini said nothing.

Philippe Lazzarini, UNRWA’s Director-General, having received from Israel a list of 100 UNRWA staff who are Hamas or PIJ’s military operatives, has neither suspended them nor launched an independent investigation of those claims.

He still has not taken any action to enforce the prohibition on membership in armed groups.

Nor has he stated that membership in an armed group is a sufficient cause for not hiring a person by UNRWA or terminating his or her employment.

But UNRWA employees in Gaza are not just collaborators with, or members of, terror groups. They are also sexual predators who take advantage of Gazan girls and women.

More on this latest revelation can be found here:

“Is the UN now covering up report about sexual abuse by humanitarian workers in Gaza?,” Elder of Ziyon, August 25, 2024:

There’s a Watergate-era adage that the coverup is worse than the crime. The UN is now trying to cover up its knowledge of sexual abuse by humanitarian workers in Gaza.

Last month, I discovered a 72-page UN report released in April by the PSEA [Protection from Sexual Exploitation and Abuse] Network called the “Risk Mitigation Assessment Report to prevent sexual exploitation and abuse in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.” It included this:

According to the SEARO 2022 Index, Palestine ranked in the 20th position among the context with higher risks of SEA.

Yet, the onset of the war has challenged the resilience of the network and a completely different context is unfolding with important emergent risks of sexual exploitation and abuse by aid workers and related personnel….

Food insecurity, loss of livelihoods, and acute aid dependency are highly engendered matters that further expose women and children to SGBV [sexual gender-based violence] and VAC [violence against children], including by Aid Workers.

[H]umanitarian actors must scale up their PSEA and Safeguarding capacity to prevent an epidemic of SEA abuses committed by personnel related to humanitarian operations.

This should be also seconded by programmatic actions to protect the most vulnerable from sexual exploitation and abuse by aid workers but also other actors.

Several times it warned that there was sexual abuse by aid workers in Gaza, and even warned of a potential “epidemic.”…

Since I first discovered UN reports mentioning aid worker sexual abuse in Gaza, including forcing women into prostitution to get food aid, the only news site to pick up the story has been The Jerusalem Post.

And now it appears that UNICEF and the PSEA Network are both trying to make it difficult for anyone else to see their April report that describes this problem….

Despite the efforts of UNICEF and the PSEA Network to try to hide their own reports on sexual exploitation of Gazan females by UNRWA employees, Elder of Ziyon has managed to find those reports.

What they tell us is that “aid workers” — almost all of whom, in Gaza, are UNRWA employees — have been using threats to withhold humanitarian aid so as to obtain sexual favors from girls and women in Gaza.

Isn’t this something the UN General Assembly ought to be discussing?

Surely these charges of sexual exploitation of Gazan females by UNRWA workers, admitted to in reports by UNICEF and the PSEA, ought to be the final blow to UNRWA, resulting in its dissolution and its replacement by a new, unsullied humanitarian aid group, with no ties to Hamas or PIJ.

But don’t worry. Nothing will happen to UNRWA.

It has survived worse scandals, including the membership of so many of its employees in Hamas and PIJ, and the participation of UNRWA workers in the murders of Israelis on October 7.

It will survive this. And the sexual exploitation of Gazan girls and women by UNRWA workers, trading humanitarian aid for sex, will continue.

Gazahumanitarian aidsexual assaultUNRWA